Executives and other employees of a company (or other public or private enterprise) often attend seminars and other trade or industry conferences to stay abreast of market developments, legal/regulatory requirements, and the like. Another important aspect of seminars and conferences is for executives to network in order to establish new relationships and maintain existing ones with clients, customers, vendors/suppliers, and even competitors.
It is common that executives attending a conference (e.g., health care conference) will have a hard copy briefing book prepared ahead of time. The hard copy briefing book typically identifies attendees of interest (or in some cases, all attendees) and their backgrounds. FIG. 1 shows two pages of a conventional briefing book in a spiral-bound hard copy. Such conventional briefing books are typically created by filling in Microsoft® Word® documents based on preset templates and then printed out as hard copies. Such hard copy briefing books have numerous drawbacks and disadvantages. They are difficult to create and difficult to use. Hard copy briefing books can be 150-200 pages or more. Thus, they are costly in terms of the time and cost required to create them. Typically, an executive will study the briefing book before the conference but not bring it into the conference. As a practical matter, briefing books often cannot be carried around and used by the executive during a conference. They are just too unwieldy. Even shorter/lighter briefing books are not likely to be carried and used in a mobile fashion because effective networking is not usually served by comparing pictures in a book to attendees in a manner that calls attention to what the user is doing.
Hard copy briefing books are often disposed of following conferences. In that regard, they tend to be one-use-only products. Thus, they are not only expensive to create in the first place, but that investment is essentially lost since the book will not be reused.
What is needed is a system and method for a briefing book that more effective, less costly, and that has a range of features that overcome at least some of the problems and drawbacks in the prior art.
Other problems and drawbacks also exist.